The Amphitheatre of Volterra: Integrated Survey and Data Representation

Thanks to the continuous development of surveying techniques, nowadays, a wide amount of information can be acquired in a short period of time. This information often derives from various surveying procedures interacting with one another to enrich the database, which is pivotal to the study of the surveyed subject. The present article aims to describe how different techniques of expeditious surveys can be interconnected to provide a more detailed description of the studied subject. Some techniques of digital survey, i.e. terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), topography and the structurefrom-motion (SfM) technique can be simultaneously used and made to interact with one another, in order to compile an exhaustive database, rich in colorimetric and metric information. The case study for this research is the discovery of the amphitheatre of Volterra. It was discovered in July 2015 during the clearance operation of a local stream and it is located near Porta Diana, a few hundred metres from the Roman Theatre, which was discovered in the 1950s. The excavation campaign started between October and November 2015 and it revealed the ridges of the structure’s support walls. The structure is constituted by three levels, which together are nearly ten metres deep. During a second excavation campaign in May 2016 four other samples were unearthed, which proved, with near certainty, the dimensions of the amphitheatre (82m x 64m).